Book Review of Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins

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The war in 1940 without the benefit of any hindsight or strategic overview.

 

This is well-researched historical fiction, but the author has done a good job of finding out (and imagining) what her characters would have known and thought about the early stages of the second world war rather than conducting detailed research into the big picture at any particular stage. Everything is changing because of how the war is going in Norway, but this is all about working class people in Sheffield and they had only the vaguest idea just what it was that was happening in Norway. (Non-fiction works that I have read suggest that in early 1940 the British War Cabinet didn’t really know either. It was only after the surviving Norwegian forces were based on British soil that cooperation and information-sharing really began to happen.)

When the same disaster happens in France, then the Cabinet does know, because British forces have been there in strength for long enough to establish proper communications and the distances are shorter. This magnifies the shock when the public are actually told the worst because their new Prime Minister actually knows how bad things are.

Most of this book is about how the women who work for Vickers in Sheffield cope with not knowing where most of their menfolk are and how much danger they are in. They cope by unselfishly looking after each other and the few men they have left as best they can -and by keeping as busy as they can, not only to “do their bit” and help the war effort, but also to stop themselves thinking about what might happen. (Incidentally, in both NAZI Germany and the Soviet Union the ruling party took control of neighbourliness and social cohesion at every level through national party organisations or local party committees. Britain may have benefited from not having a ruling party as such during the second world war because it ruled out an entire category of fatal mistakes.)

But then there is the question of how such brave and kind women, mostly quite young, make the transition from coping with the unknown to coping with the worst. And that appears to be a question for the next book in this series.

Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins is published in the UK by HQ on the 18^th of August 2022.